"A Style of Our Time" - in the first half of the 19th c.

"More than anything, the architectural discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century was conditioned by the problem of self-expression: how to conceive and craft a 'style of our time.'
...
The debate rested on two related assumptions. First, it relied on a notion of style understood as the relative character of time and place. Second, it presupposed that history could be seen as a succession of epochs that evolve according to laws and manifest themselves by means of style."

Mari Hvattum
Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism
pp. 149-150

Goethe - "It is a living whole"

The Gothic cathedral, in its overall composition as well as its most minute detail formed a harmonious, purposeful unity, indeed an organic whole. (1)

"This...is the only true art. It becomes active through inner, unified, particular and independent feeling, unadorned by, indeed unaware of, all foreign elements,...it is a living whole."

(1) Mari Hvattum

Goethe - appear both natural and beyond nature

The highest form of imitation is

"for an artist to penetrate into the depths of things as well as into the depths of his own soul, so as to produce in his works not only something light and superficially effective, but, as the rival of nature, something spiritually organic, and to give it a content and a form by which it appears both natural and beyond nature."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Introduction to Propylaen

Vitruvius, Laugier, Mies

Vitruvius relates the orders to human proportion. Laugier's origin theory evoked an architecture that represented nothing but its own structural principle.
-Mari Hvattum

Mies unites the two by emphasizing architecture's structural principle and human proportion.

Laugier's method gives clarity

I asked myself how to account for my own feelings and wanted to know why one thing delighted me and another only pleased me, why i found one disagreeable, another unbearable. At first this search led only to obscurity and uncertainty. Yet I was not discouraged; I sounded the abyss until I thought I had discovered the bottom and did not cease to ask my soul until it had given me a satisfactory answer. Suddenly a bright light appeared before my eyes. I saw objects distinctly where I had only caught a glimpse of haze and clouds.
- Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769) Essai

look up

An equally lonely search for 'clear and distinct' truths had been described by Descartes more than 100 years before. - Mari Hvattum

Laugier on simplicity

"Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendours of architecture ever conceived have been modelled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of the first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved." - Marc Antoine Laugier (1713-1769)

"Allegory of Architecture Returning to its Natural Model"

Charles Eisen
frontispiece to M.-A. Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture

Like Schinkel's Altes Museum.

Crown Hall is
on a plinth.

One room school house

Crown Hall

Aufklärung

In German the word for the Enlightment is der Aufklärung. Klär as in clear. That's a virtue. As in Alles klar! - Everything is clear, everything is understood, everything is allright.
--
Clear glass. Clarity of space.

Semper

Semper saw art as an inscrutable source and symbol of meaning; yet at the same time, he tried to render this source into a transparent and accessible object for the science-historian.
-Mari Hvattum
"Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism"

--
As is Crown Hall